Comedian Michelle Wolf has been widely condemned for attacking White House press secretary Sarah Sanders’s appearance and job performance at the White House Correspondents’ dinner over the weekend.
Her monologue, which also derided President Trump and other members of his administration, has been characterized as vulgar, ugly, and not funny.
Amid Wolf’s failed attempts at humor and the ensuing blowback, a disturbing but commonplace phenomenon has received much less attention: Women on the Left, like Wolf, seem to equate vulgarity with female empowerment. As such, they often make crude references to sex and sexual organs in public and celebrate the comments as a sign of liberation.
Early in Wolf’s performance on Saturday, she said:
Wolf was referring to the knitted pink hats that have become a symbol of the feminist retort to Trump. According to the website of the Pussyhat Project™, the hat was so named in part as a protest against Trump’s boasts about grabbing women by the genitals, and to “de-stigmatize the word ‘pussy’ and transform it into one of empowerment.”
Hundreds of thousands of women bought into the symbolism and wore the hat to the Women’s March in Washington in January 2017 and 2018. Their numbers, however, do not change the intrinsic ludicrousness of the hat’s name or the absurdity that lies at the heart of modern feminism from which the hat’s affiliated movement derived inspiration.
Condemning Trump’s vulgarity would have been and remains perfectly legitimate, but that would have been far too reasonable for feminists. They went further: They adopted his vulgarity, magnified it, and flaunted it. They thought it was an act of empowerment; instead, they created a sea of ugly pink hats with a stupid name.
The pure ugliness of the knitted hat would make one question the taste of the woman wearing it, but the outlandish and intentional crudeness of the hat’s trademarked name should lead one to question her self-respect.
Not surprisingly, by the time that Wolf talked about the p—y hat at the White House Correspondents’ dinner, her language was decidedly disgusting, and far more graphic and vulgar. In some ways, she even matched the level of coarseness exhibited by Trump during some of his most undignified moments.
If that was not enough, Wolf added more at the end of her performance. Making fun of Trump for not being nearly as wealthy as he claims, she said, “Trump is so broke … he grabs p—ies ’cause he thinks there might be loose change in them.”
By then, she had gone far beyond being highly inappropriate at a black-tie dinner broadcast live on national television and featuring journalists who cover the most powerful man in the world. As quite a few of them laughed or played along with her jokes, their usual insistence that hostility to Trump was in service to the First Amendment and the truth showed itself to be a veneer of self-importance and self-congratulation.
Yet one question remains: Why are so many liberal women obsessed about making public references to their genitals in the first place?
As it turns out, feminism has long taught that in the name of equality, men and women are just the same, and differences that exist are only social constructs created by a sexist, male-dominated world. Hence, qualities that society has traditionally cherished in women — grace, elegance, modesty — are not to be adapted, adjusted, or given serious thought in the modern world. Instead, it is to be wantonly trashed on the road to supposed female empowerment.
According to this logic, there would be nothing wrong with women exhibiting and embracing the type of vulgarity men tend to display.
It makes no difference if many men, both good and bad, try to restrict their most vulgar behavior to each other’s company. For instance, when Trump bragged about grabbing women by the p—y, he did so not in fancy dress behind a lectern, but in a private conversation (albeit with a group of men he did not know well). Often criticized for his vulgarity, even Trump knew that his type of talk was not for public consumption.
Yet feminists or women who see it as their sacred duty to #Resist the Trump presidency have no such common sense. They have long been taught that just because men are prone to behave indecently means that women could and should as well.
Of course, feminist vulgarity is not limited to the topics of sex and sexual organs. Swearing before the entire country seems to be another prerequisite for the Left’s idea of the modern woman. Comedian Kathy Griffin, a proud Trump hater, recently appeared on ABC’s “The View” and attacked Trump in a profanity-laced rant. Similarly, Wolf’s act at the White House Correspondents’ dinner was noteworthy for all of its bleep-necessary moments (C-SPAN radio actually cut away from Wolf, lest she violate the FCC’s indecency guidelines).
Certainly, plenty of women swear in private this day and age. But a certain level of decorum is normally expected at formal events and on national television. No doubt many men do not feel limited by such propriety (just watch the late-night shows on Comedy Central), but once again, women’s equality should not mean taking every opportunity to behave as boorishly as men possibly could.
Trump has never pretended to be an angel. Whatever his flaws (and there are many), his vulgarity has ironically helped showcase his feminist detractors’ ideology as what it really is: morally bankrupt and unhinged.
Ying Ma (@GZtoGhetto) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is the former deputy director of the Committee for American Sovereignty, a pro-Trump super PAC, and the former deputy policy director of the Ben Carson presidential campaign. She is the author of Chinese Girl in the Ghetto.
